Upper Cape base water samples show contamination

Christine Legere @ChrisLegereCCT

Tuesday

May 22, 2018 at 7:24 PMMay 23, 2018 at 6:14 AM

Military officials say compounds found in firefighting foam have been under investigation for years.

JOINT BASE CAPE COD — Joint Base Cape Cod is included on a national list of military installations where contamination with possible links to cancer and other diseases has been detected in drinking water and groundwater in and around their sites.

The presence of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) — ingredients used in firefighting foam since 1970 — came as no surprise to base officials.

“The Air Force has been investigating PFOS and PFOA for multiple years,” said Douglas Karson, the Air Force Civil Engineer Center’s community involvement lead. “It is what is going on at all the installations.”

The military installations submitted their water sampling results to the U.S. Department of Defense, based on data from August 2017.

At Joint Base Cape Cod, two of the nine samples taken from public drinking water supplies located off-base exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended level of 70 parts per trillion.

Of the 73 off-base private wells sampled, 22 exceeded the standard.

Maureen Sullivan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment, safety and occupational health, released the national report to the Armed Services Committee in late March.

“We’ve done a lot since then,” Forbes said. “We recognize there is contamination out there, and we’re mitigating it.”

PFOS and PFOA move quickly in groundwater. Of the 26 groundwater samples taken off-site at Joint Base Cape Cod, 13 exceeded the advisory level on the data collection date in 2017.

The perfluorinated compounds PFOS and PFOA are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as “contaminants of emerging concern.”

A formal maximum level has not yet been set, but the EPA issued a “lifetime health advisory” in 2016 for amounts exceeding 70 parts per trillion.

Studies have found a possible link between the compounds and developmental delays in fetuses and children, decreased fertility, increased cholesterol, changes to the immune system, increased uric acid levels, changes in liver enzymes, and prostate, kidney and testicular cancer, according to the report issued by Sullivan.

The 22,000-acre Upper Cape military base is located over a sole-source aquifer that supplies drinking water to the more than 200,000 year-round residents and 500,000 seasonal residents on Cape Cod.

Buried munitions, fuel spills and seeping contaminants from decades of training exercises poisoned the groundwater under the base and flowed into neighboring communities. Two cleanup programs have been underway for decades, one a federal Superfund program overseen by the Air Force and the other regulated under the federal Clean Water Act and overseen by the Army.

Karson said some progress has been made. Initially the base had 19 identified plumes, or pathways, where contamination was spreading. One of those has been signed off by government authorities as sufficiently clean to no longer require treatment. Several other plumes are showing significant improvement as well, but the base's groundwater treatment system still treats 11 million gallons each day. The current expansion of the investigation could lead to the discovery of more contamination as the compound continues to travel in the groundwater.

"We may be treating more depending how investigation results come in," he said.

Base officials believe the contamination found in the 2017 samples was caused by firefighting foam used in the base’s fire training area as well as in areas where fuel spills were treated with the foam.

Forbes cited some recent detection and remediation efforts.

A municipal well in Mashpee Village, which had exceeded the advisory level for the fluorinated compounds earlier last year, was shut down, she said. “We also found new contamination from the landfill, but in an area already being treated.”

Residents of a 93-unit mobile home park in Mashpee called Lakeside Estates were provided with bottled water when contamination was found, and the base has since hooked the mobile homes up to the municipal water system, Forbes said.

“There were also rollovers of fuel tanker trucks in 1997 and 2000 at the Otis Rotary,” she said. “Firefighters put the fires out with foam.”

The groundwater flows west from the rotary. “We’ve just started providing bottled water or filtration systems in Pocasset, and we’ve been on County Road and the golf course collecting water samples.”

Karson said the base has been given funding for new investigation. Monitoring wells will be sunk and private drinking wells tested in Mashpee and Falmouth, in the area south of Johns and Ashumet ponds, where contamination exceeded the EPA’s advisory level.

“We’ll check with the water departments for properties not on municipal water and test those wells,” Karson said. “We had found a handful of properties off Route 151 that tested above the advisory limit, and we’re now researching additional properties. If tests come in above the advisory, we’ll offer bottled water.”

The farther one is from the base, the deeper the perfluorinated compounds will be in the water, so private wells may not be tapping into the contamination.